To Catch a Thief (part 1)

Online art thieves....

Do you wonder if your artwork is being used or SOLD without your knowledge or consent?

Do you know an artist who has experienced this?

The internet has changed the way artist sell art...and art thieves steal it!

Creating art is a gift. Truly a wonderful experience that is meant to shared. Without an audience, or sharing our creations, what would be the point? Artists thrive on acknowledgement, recognition, approval, even criticism to validate and/or support their creative efforts. And for any of us attempting to support ourselves through the sale of our art online, the idea of unauthorized use or sale (or even taking credit as the artist) is one of our biggest fears.

Without a doubt, many times this unlawful act is harmless (somewhat innocent). Either the violator is ignorant to the rights of the artist or creator of an image, or possibly their illegal use of the image(s) is not meant for monetary gain. But what about a huge, top selling e-commerce site, based in China, offering your artwork in print? YES this happens! Well, today I found several free tools to help search for my images on the web.By "image searching" for your photos or artwork, any websites and pages displaying the image will pop up. Of course, your webpages will be listed,

along with any others crawled by Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and more. I found that some of these search sites were not effective, however one was amazing.Image Raider http://www.imageraider.com/ returned dozens of results.This site is designed for exactly what I am trying to do. It allows you to upload your catalogue of images and even receive alerts if they are posted in the future.

Subscribe to my blog for ..Part 2...

How to protect yourself. Artist property checklist. Copyright details and... WHERE I found dozens of stolen images being sold online!